Eddi Reader, Kings Place, London, 1 October 2021
[by Ken Hunt, London] 
Even as she juggles an extensive repertoire and audience expectations, Eddi Reader is the sort of performer who gives one-off performances. Celebrating four decades as a professional musician whether as a name soloist, the lead vocalist in the successful group Fairground Attraction or going back to singing, apparently, with the likes of the Eurythmics and The Waterboys, what she delivers is bespoke and draws on an astoundingly impressive trove of material, traditional, original and covers.
18. 11. 2021 | read more...
What was the last live gig you saw before Covid-19 brought live music in front of audiences juddering to a standstill? Mine was Yorkston Thorne Khan’s London concert on 11 March 2020. It was the start of their tour promoting their third album, Navarasa: Nine Emotions. YTK are James Yorkston on nyckelharpa (Swedish keyed fiddle), 6-string guitar and vocals, Jon Thorne on double-bass, 6-string guitar and vocals, and Suhail Yusuf Khan on sarangi and vocals.
[by Ken Hunt, London] 2020 will go down as the first year of Covid-19. It was the strangest year for making music..
[by Ken Hunt, London] Another year of writing, though ever fewer outlets didn’t bother me unduly. 2019 still meant masses of musical discoveries, reaffirmations and new historic explorations. 
[by Ken Hunt, London] The year went very well indeed with masses of musical discoveries and reaffirmations. For decades I have written in U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague 1. The image is of me at its previous site when it was on Úvoz with Jakub ‘Kuba’ Krejčí’s mural of Czechoslovak historical and literary figures behind me. Now at Loretánská 13 I still write and hold meetings there.
by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger wrote an autobiographical self-portrait in song overnight between Sheffield and London in 1973. In the booklet notes to her CD, The Folkways Years 1955-1982, she clarified: “It was intended to answer those people who come up during the interval or after a concert, those who interview you on radio or want to do write-ups. It is an answer to the question about why a middle-class female from a comfortable background ..
[by Ken Hunt, London] With any selection of new Richard Thompson songs, there’s no knowing in whose company and in what straits listeners will be plunged. There might be a long-awaited cheap-suited estate agent or the borderline apocalyptic.
[by Ken Hunt, London] Much of Shelter was composed, if not conceived, in the relative seclusion of a cottage on the North Yorkshire Moors. Its accent is on self-written songs. Like the songs here, the artwork photos capture rural English scenes, Roman antiquities – as if reflecting her Florence (Firenze) birthplace (and the song Roman Holiday) – and, as with the visual backdrop to A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a smidgeon of citified ways.
[by Ken Hunt, London] John Barlow became a cyber-guru and free speech advocate but when I first got to know him some – thanks to Eileen Law in the Grateful Dead office in the early 1980s, he was the second lyricist for San Francisco’s Grateful Dead. He wouldn’t have bleated about that that.
[by Ken Hunt, London] This is an adapted article, based on an interview with Zoe and Idris Rahman that we did yards away from the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank in 2008 for Jazzwise. The focus was the newly released Where Rivers Meet. O, River also titled O nodi re opens Zoe and Idris Rahman’s Where Rivers Meet. It starts with a water ripple of piano